A trashy reminder
For several weeks, literally thousands of people have spent their time scouring satellite images of the Indian Ocean for remnants of Malaysia Air flight MH370. It seems almost daily now that possible debris is cited in the water, but these sightings keep turning out to be a different problem; trash.
Humankind has treated the oceans as our final garbage dump. Sometimes it’s done deliberately; trash or even shipping containers can be dumped in the ocean to get rid of them. Sometimes it’s less deliberate; the discarded plastic bottle on the side of the road gets picked up by water during a storm, carried down a river, and eventually finds its way to the ocean. Sometimes it’s not even on purpose; the tsunami waves hitting Japan in 2011 and the Indian Ocean in 2004 carried enormous amounts of debris into the oceans.
The image on the left is a satellite image showing debris in the Indian Ocean; this concentration of debris caused a search team to head to that area hunting for the plane. The image on the right shows a representation of what it probably actually was; random, floating chunks of something, discarded by man at some point.
The waters of Earth’s oceans turn in circular patterns called gyres driven by winds in the atmosphere. Around the edges of these gyres there are strong currents, but the waters in the center are quieter. Floating objects naturally get trapped in these quiet waters, creating the great oceanic garbage patches. Occasionally, some of those objects find a current and are carried away, heading out to shore, or potentially to one of these search areas.
These garbage patches are a problem every day for the life that lives in these areas, but the unique circumstances of this search have created a situation where they’re once again an active problem for the world as well.
-JBB
Image credits: Kal Schreiber (Creative commons license): https://www.flickr.com/photos/50457550@N00/7030900 Satellite image from GISTDA, shared by AP
Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/ocean-garbage-frustrates-search-for-flight-370/2014/03/31/bf5718de-b8c2-11e3-80de-2ff8801f27af_story.html http://www.salon.com/2014/03/27/one_thing_weve_learned_from_the_search_for_flight_mh370_theres_a_lot_of_trash_in_the_ocean/ http://www.krcrtv.com/news/Ocean-garbage-problem-hampers-plane-search/25090362 http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/03/31/mh370_debris_australia_says_orange_objects_were_fishing_gear.html